Take Control of Backing Up Your Mac, Third Edition

Set up a rock-solid backup strategy so that you can restore quickly and completely, no matter what catastrophe arises.

Creating and maintaining a solid backup plan is essential to anyone who uses a Mac, in order to prevent the loss of important data if disaster strikes—whether through hardware or software failure, theft, human error, or other mishap. In Take Control of Backing Up Your Mac, Third Edition, tech expert Joe Kissell explains how to design a sensible backup strategy, choose and configure the best backup hardware and software for your needs, and understand how to make your backups as painless as possible. His advice is equally useful to those who have never had a backup system and those whose backup systems are in need of an update.

This book covers 10.9 Mavericks or later, including 10.13 High Sierra, and it’s mostly accurate for Mojave too. A free update planned for later in 2018 will cover applicable changes to Mojave.

Design (or update) the ideal backup system: If you’re starting from scratch, you’ll find all the information necessary to assemble a reliable and easy-to-use backup system. If you’re updating an existing system, you’ll learn about what’s new in hardware, software, and online services that might affect the way you back up your Mac in the future.

Choose backup software: Apple’s Time Machine is both free and easy to use, but it’s not the best choice for everyone, and even if you do use Time Machine, you’ll certainly want to supplement it with other tools. You’ll learn about key features to look for in a backup app and find tips on using several popular tools. You’ll also discover the pros and cons of cloud backup services, and get help choosing the right one. (An online appendix covers nearly 100 apps and services.)

Shop for hardware: For most users, hard drives make an excellent backup destination, but the range of options (sizes, interfaces, speeds, and more) can be bewildering. Joe helps you find the best backup hardware, whether it’s individual hard drives, RAIDs, Drobo storage devices, Time Capsules, or NAS devices.

Make and maintain backups: Once you’ve selected hardware and software, you’ll need to know how to make your first backup, set up your backups to run unattended, and test them regularly to make sure they’re working as they should. This includes both versioned backups (which contain old file versions and deleted files) and bootable clones. And, you’ll learn about strategies for keeping extra backups offsite.

Operate Time Machine: If you choose Time Machine for versioned backups, you’ll learn how to back up and restore individual files, app-specific data (such as contacts), and even an entire disk. You’ll also discover why and how to encrypt Time Machine backups and what to do if Time Machine misbehaves.

Deal with unusual backup needs: If you deal with exceptionally large files (such as audio and video files), spend a lot of time on the road away from your usual backup hardware, run Windows on your Mac, or rely on cloud services to store essential data, you’ll want to take extra (or different) steps to make sure everything is safely backed up.

Manage your media: What happens when a backup drive fills up, or becomes so old that you worry about its future reliability? What if you want to archive older files for posterity, but not necessarily maintain them as part of your daily backups? Joe explains how to deal with media management tasks such as these.

Recover lost data: Backing up data can be easy, but restoring it is often more challenging. When you discover that data is missing—whether due to a disk error, theft, or a simple mistake—you need to know the exact steps needed to recover it and get back to work as soon as possible.

Since it was first released, this book has undergone numerous revisions, and has had other titles—most recently, Backing Up Your Mac: A Joe On Tech Guide, Second Edition. This new edition of the book brings it back under the Take Control banner, and includes many changes that reflect the latest information under macOS 10.13 High Sierra. (For more details about what has changed, see the What’s New section below.)

What happened to Backing Up Your Mac: A Joe On Tech Guide?Long story short, this is an updated version of the same book, with a different title. The Joe On Tech book started out as Take Control of Backing Up Your Mac, and now it’s back home in the Take Control catalog.

What's New

What's New in the Third Edition

Besides bringing this book back into the Take Control brand, this new edition features the following major changes from Backing Up Your Mac: A Joe On Tech Guide, version 2.1:

Updated the entire book for compatibility with macOS 10.13 High Sierra; see “High Sierra Appears” for an overview, plus “APFS Changes the Rules” for information on how the APFS file system affects backups

Removed coverage of CrashPlan, except for the explanation of why I no longer recommend it

Removed coverage of FireWire (which hasn’t been seen on new Macs in many years) and eSATA (which was never a built-in option), while saying more about Thunderbolt 3 and USB-C

I joined Chuck Joiner on MacVoices (audio and video) to discuss the new editions of Take Control of Backing Up Your Mac, Take Control of Maintaining Your Mac, Take Control of Troubleshooting Your Mac, and Take Control of Speeding Up Your Mac—including their transition from Joe On Tech books back to the Take Control world:

Take Control of Backing Up Your Mac, 2nd Edition was published a few months before the release of OS X 10.9 Mavericks, and a number of people have asked whether the book is still up to date, or whether anything about Mavericks changes the backup story. The short answer is: The book is still fine. You can follow all the instructions in the book, even if you’re running Mavericks.

However, a few facts have changed that you may want to be aware of:

Mavericks and Time Machine: Although Time Machine in Mavericks functions almost identically to the way it did previously, the menu bar icon no longer spins when a backup is in progress; it only displays a tiny triangle below the point of the circular arrow—the subtlest indication that a backup is occurring. In addition, Time Machine no longer displays Time Capsule disks as mounted drives in the Finder during regular backups.

AirPort Disks: I say on pages 41, 43, and 73 that you can’t use Time Machine to back up your Mac to an AirPort Disk—that is, an external USB disk connected to an AirPort Extreme Base Station. But now you can, if, and only if, you have one of the new, tall, 802.11ac models of the AirPort Extreme released in June 2013 (shortly after the book was published). The older, flatter models still don’t support Time Machine. (However, all Time Capsule models, including the old flat ones and the new tall ones, do support Time Machine backups to an external USB disk.) You can read more about this in Adam Engst’s TidBITS article Use Time Machine with the 802.11ac AirPort Extreme Base Station.

James Pond: In several places in the book, I mention James Pond’s fabulous Apple OS X and Time Machine Tips site. The site is still there and remains a valuable resource, but James Pond died in September 2013 at the age of 70. I was very sorry to hear of this.

Backupify: This backup service, which I mention on p. 172, has changed its focus to be strictly business-oriented, and although it can still back up Gmail, it now supports only Google Apps accounts. The pricing structure has changed, as well.

I do have a (short) list of other topics I’d like to cover in more detail or clarify in some way in a future version of the book, but they aren’t specific to Mavericks and also not particularly urgent. Very tentatively, I imagine I might update the book to version 2.1 after the next version of OS X (10.10?) is released, presumably late in 2014—but we’ll have to see what changes Apple has in store for us and when.

Take Control publisher Joe Kissell has written more than 60 books about technology, including many popular Take Control books. He also runs Interesting Thing of the Day and is a contributing editor of TidBITS and a senior contributor to Macworld.

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